Item order effect in Juster Scale pricing research

Pricing decision making can be helped by estimating the underlying demand curve. While various methods are available to do this, most are cumbersome or only available in certain circumstances. It would be very useful to be able to estimate demand curves with efficient and rapid survey methodologies, such as repeated Juster scale questions on purchase likelihood at different prices. However, a previous small-sample study found that this approach was subject to strong item order effects. We undertook a differentiated replication of this study using Juster pricing questions for a new product concept (n= 153), randomly applying a second version of the questionnaire with the price order reversed. The initial results showed strong apparent item order effects, but in the opposite direction to that previously reported. However, when Juster scores were adjusted for the overall difference in price sensitivity between the sub-samples (measured independently) the apparent item order effects disappeared. Thus, we found no item order effects in Juster scale price research, and evidence to the contrary is probably due to sampling error. This opens the way for the Juster scale to be widely used in demand curve estimation.